fic; christmas morning
Title: Christmas Morning
Pairing: Mostly Jin-centric, with some sort of ambiguous Pin and KAT-TUN friendship.
Rating: PG
Warnings: future!fic (only a year), apocalyptic!fic, angst, weirdness, and idefk. DX
Summary: On Christmas morning, the world ends.
Author’s Note: 4014 words. For crystallekil because she wanted it. ♥ Jin talked about his song Christmas Morning here and how it’s supposedly about the end of the world. I don’t really know what this turned into, so uhm. Yeah. I hope you like it anyway? DX *hides*
“What is it like over there?”
Jin shrugs even through Yamapi can’t see it, and shifts his phone more comfortably in the crook between his shoulder and ear. He glances out of the windows, the drapes spread wide open, looking over onto the frozen, white canvas outside.
“Cold,” he says eventually, and curls up under his covers a bit more. His heater busted a few days ago; the extremity of the weather being too much for it to handle. There hasn’t been anyone around to get it fixed.
Yamapi laughs on the other end, a little breathless and sad. Lonely. Jin feels it in his chest. He grips his phone tighter. “It’s raining like crazy, here,” he tells Jin, though Jin already knows, caught it on his television that morning before the current went out, black and gray fuzz filling the screen, white noise crackling through the speakers.
“Pi,” he says quietly after a long stretch of silence. They have them quite often these days, unsure of what to say, every other topic already discussed and exhausted. There’s only so much to say when the world is ending.
“I know,” is all Yamapi says in reply and he does, Jin knows he does, and that means more than anything.
--
There are snowstorms all over the United States. Los Angeles is just one of the many cities covered in piles of pale, lifeless snow. Buildings look like tall icebergs erupting from cascades of white. The skies are all dark, a deep shade of gray, and blizzards begin and end within hours every day.
Jin is trapped. He wishes the signs had come sooner, wishes he could have gotten the first ticket back home - his real home. One year in L.A. and he still hasn’t adjusted. Despite his love for the city, he hasn’t gotten used to being unable to head to his parents house just to eat his mother’s cooking or tease his brother, hasn’t gotten used to visiting his favorite places, hasn’t gotten used to just heading to Yamapi’s and taking over half of his bed because he’s too lazy to get all the way to his own.
His apartment in L.A. is small and dingy, nothing like where he lived before. Only a few minimal things fill up the place; the rest are still in boxes. He hasn’t had the time, with his first U.S. Tour the fall of 2010, followed by an ever larger tour the next year, and the release of an album. It didn’t sell well at all, for the States’ standards, but Jin had expected that. He knew it’d be hard, he was prepared. He still felt proud, prouder than ever, an inexplicable glee in his chest when he had strolled into the nearest music store to find his CD on the shelves.
Even when Yamapi had called and teased him about it, Jin had been soaring with pride. It was his first real accomplishment, he thought, without the aid of a major industry stamped across his forehead.
“I’ll send you a copy. I’ll even sign it. Someday it’ll be worth millions,” Jin had told him only to end up in a fit of laughter when Yamapi said he’d already ordered one.
This is what he thinks about these days, with nothing else to do. It’s worse here than in Tokyo, where he knows Yamapi and the others are sometimes forced into keeping their meetings, even though everyone knows there is no use. Yamapi does it because he wants to, he tells Jin, because he’ll keep his fans happy until the day that he dies, until the world swallows them all up in one giant gulp.
“I’m not scared,” he says one day, and Jin wishes he could be that strong.
--
There are floods in the Sahara and blazing sunlight in Greenland; tsunamis destroy the shores of England and hailstorms pelt nearly all of South America.
All Jin cares about is Japan. The unyielding thunderstorms of crackling lightning and booming thunder with torrential rain. He thinks about his family and his friends. Though mostly he thinks about Yamapi, and how he is stuck here, across an ocean that is now raging full of whirlpools, in a frozen desert on his own.
He hasn’t heard from any of his L.A. friends in a long time. Not for a month at least, he thinks. And now it’s December, and the winds are colder, crisper, and Jin merely huddles under as many layers of clothing he can, glad that his neighbor used to live in one of those states were snow was a regular part of the year and gave Jin a few thick blankets and winter coats.
Jin hasn’t heard from him in weeks, either.
He rarely ventures outside, he’s heard of the people who go and never come back and he doesn’t want to risk it. He has food, stocked up when the first snow fell. He doesn’t eat that much; he never has the appetite, and the insistent uneasiness in his stomach makes it hard to keep anything down.
He can’t tell the days from the nights, the entire country encased in a billowing darkness that feels haunted. He’s never felt more alone in his life, his only comfort from the few telephone calls he makes as the world continues to spin towards its end.
--
“Are you okay?”
Jin nods to himself and replies with a strained, “I’m fine, Mom.”
She doesn’t believe him, he can tell in her voice. “You’ve been eating properly?”
He nods again. “Of course.” He tries to sound cheerful.
“I miss you, baby,” she says and he’s too choked up now to reply; but it’s okay because Jin knows she knows he wishes he was there instead of here.
--
Yamapi’s the only person he can talk to normally. Because Yamapi is Yamapi and they have no secrets.
“I’m lonely,” he tells him, and he is. It’s nearing Christmas, according to the calendar on his phone. It was hard last year, spending his first Christmas in L.A. with the knowledge that he’s actually going to be here for a very long time, unlike when he was here in 2006, which had all in all felt more like a vacation than an actual, nearly permanent move. This year it’s even worse, with the continuous blizzards that shake the walls and the whistling wind that seems to have replaced all human presence. “This is some kind of punishment for me leaving, isn’t it?”
Yamapi snorts. “Contrary to what you may think, the world does not, in fact, revolve around you,” he says and Jin finds himself grinning for the first time in days.
“I wish I was in Japan,” he says, snuggling under covers on his couch. He flips through channels on the television, mostly crackling, shaky pictures. The only channels that work are reporting news on the world’s destructions: riots all over the globe, people breaking into empty homes and shops, taking whatever they can get their hands on, others injured, their homes torn apart by the hundreds of natural disasters taking place at once, even more dying, or dead already, the toll escalating with each passing day. Jin shuts the television off, tosses the remote to the floor, watches it slide under a bookshelf.
“I wish you were here, too,” Yamapi says in a quiet voice, so quiet Jin almost doesn’t catch it. But he does, and it makes his heart clench painfully, makes his loneliness even more profound.
He can imagine it, if he’d been there with Yamapi, sitting together in one of their apartments, watching the rain come down in waterfalls, sliding down the windows while lightening illuminates the city better than any of its usual neon lights, and laugh stupidly after thunder crashes and scares them both.
It makes him laugh, the image in his head, because it’s so them, and it’s so familiar, warmth tingling under his skin. Yamapi makes an affronted sound, thinking Jin’s laughing at him, but Jin quickly says, “Sorry, sorry. It’s not you. I was just thinking about something.”
“Care to share?”
“Not really,” Jin replies, because even though his thoughts were pretty innocent, and that he knows Yamapi would share in the amusement, Jin’s own feelings about it are not entirely that naïve.
“Bakanishi,” Yamapi says and Jin laughs again because it’s been far too long since he heard that and why does it make him feel so good and so sad all at once.
He falls onto his back upon the couch and closes his eyes, imagines Yamapi’s smiling face staring back at him. He opens them with a sigh and a few minutes stretch in silence. He has so many things he wants to ask but no idea how to approach them, questions and worries and a need to know swelling inside of him. Yamapi is his only connection to Japan, and other than his mother, Jin hasn’t talked to anyone else in a long time. Ryo was probably the last person he talked to that wasn’t Yamapi or his family, and Jin wonders how he is, because when he tried to call a week ago, an automated voice told him the number was no longer in service. He’d been in a fit of panic, then, but Yamapi had told him everything was all right, and even though Jin had let out a sigh of relief, the queasiness and the pain lingered inside him for a long time after.
“Pi,” he starts after awhile, and his voice gets a little shaky as he continues, “H-How, how are, um. How are-”
Yamapi cuts him off with a chuckle. “You are so transparent, Jin,” he says. “If you call them, they’ll tell you they’re fine.”
Jin gnaws the corner of his mouth for a moment before he replies, “I don’t know if I can.”
“You can,” Yamapi says, exuding confidence as he always does, and Jin can feel it, as if it’s an electric current shot through their connected phones. “You will. Because you want to.”
And he does, even though it scares him almost as much as the end of the world. “You need to stop with this always being right shit,” Jin says and slowly smiles as Yamapi laughs loudly on the other end.
--
He hasn’t talked to any of them since he left. It sounds bad, but it’s the truth. He keeps up with their work, knows who’s doing a drama, who’s in a movie, who’s got a stage play, knows when they release something, occasionally watches it on YouTube with both nostalgia and happiness. They live different lives now; it’s as simple as that. Not once as any of them contacted him, and not once has he. Though the urge to pick up the phone and ring one of them up, complain and whine or just talk about nothing like they used to, that urge has risen many times. Jin just never went through with it. Somehow, inside, he thinks he doesn’t want to talk to them, not until he can make it big here, not until he proves what he set out to do, not until he can tell them, all of them, “Thank you” - for letting him go.
One by one he calls each of them, starting with the easiest and working his way to the most difficult. Taguchi just laughs and makes a stupid pun that actually has Jin laughing but he’s not sure if because it’s been that long or if Taguchi’s jokes have gotten that good since they last spoke. Either way, the conversation makes him happy, and gives him the courage to call Nakamaru. Nakamaru tells him everything that’s been going on gladly, within the group, the company, and Japan in general. Jin listens to him with probably the most rapt attention he’s ever given, and in the end, he just makes fun of Nakamaru’s face and goes down the list. It’s a little hard deciding who is probably angrier at him, Ueda or Koki, but in the end he calls Koki first because he’s a softy on the inside.
Koki hangs up on him when Jin calls first, and makes him wonder if he chose the right person. Except five minutes later while Jin debates calling him back, Koki calls, and exclaims, “Took you fucking long enough!” the second their phones connect. Jin lets out a sigh of relief because it is so Koki and he wonders inside, why he really hadn’t done this sooner. Ueda’s call is about the same as Koki’s, a lot of griping and bitter comments in the beginning, but then Ueda’s his usual bubbly self and leaving Jin with an empty threat of punches when they see each other next; even though they both know it won’t happen.
Calling Kame is the hardest, and Jin dials and hangs up five times the second the lines connect. He knows Kame knows it’s him, but Jin just can’t face it. Because it’s Kame, who at one point, used to be his closest friend; Kame, who he sometimes feels like he betrayed, even though they haven’t been real friends for years. It’s hard to talk to him and Jin doesn’t know what to do.
So when Kame calls him, Jin stares at his phone until the final ring before he answers with a shaky, “Hello?”
“You are such an idiot,” Kame says in form of greeting, and Jin thinks it’s rather appropriate, even if it does make him glare at his wall. “Don’t hang up like that, you’re such a girl.”
Jin snorts. “Coming from you, that’s saying a lot,” he snipes back.
Silence follows and Jin tries to think of what to say. It was easy with the others so why is it so hard with Kame? A hundred things run through his head, old memories from when they were young, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, when it felt like the entire world was at their fingertips, just waiting to be grasped and taken over with their singing and dancing and all around awesome. So many things have changed since then, and yet nothing has changed at all. He’s still Jin, and this is still Kame, sighing on the other end like he always did whenever he was exasperated, worn-out.
“Jin,” he says softly and Jin can’t even remember the last time Kame called him that; it’s been Akanishi for a long time.
He’s not sure what Kame has to say, not sure if he’s prepared to hear it, at least not until Jin says his own piece. “Kame,” he says quickly before Kame can begin, and it feels completely natural to call him Kame now, too, like he never stopped. “Look, I. I just wanted to say-”
“If you’re going to apologize for being a selfish asshole, don’t bother,” Kame says. “Not even the apocalypse could have changed you that much.”
Jin purses his lips into a pout. “But-”
“Seriously, Jin,” Kame says. “If you do, I’ll find a way over there and punch you in the face.”
Jin shakes his head, suppressing a smile. “Ueda said the same thing.”
Kame laughs. “He would,” he says with amusement. “What made you think I’d want to hear it then?”
Jin shrugs. “I don’t know, I just. Thought it needed to be said, what with the world ending and all.”
“That is so like you. Only calling us because this is your last chance; you wouldn’t have done it if everything was still okay, would you?”
It’s true and Jin knows it, but it doesn’t make the sting any less painful. “You’re right,” he says eventually and Kame mock gasps on the other end.
“Agreeing with me? That’s a first,” he says and Jin laughs.
“Things have changed,” Jin says with bravado. “I’m a different person.”
Kame snorts disbelievingly and Jin realizes he’s grinning, reminded of so many years ago when there wasn’t any hostility between them. It’s nice, this feeling, and Jin almost hates himself for waiting so long, that it took him leaving the band, and the country, for him and Kame to finally come to an understanding.
They talk for awhile, about everything and nothing, and it feels a little like catharsis, having talked to all of them, of clearing up the cobwebs. Even if it took this long, he’s glad he did it in the end, before the end, and that’s really all that matters.
When Kame says he has to go, Jin feels a little sad, but covers it up with a cheery, “I’ll talk to you later.”
“If you want,” is Kame’s response.
“Oh, and Kame?” he says quickly before Kame hangs up.
“What?”
Jin takes a deep breath and with all of his courage says, “Thank you.”
--
Christmas Eve is the worst day so far; Jin wakes in the middle of the night to the worst blizzard he’s heard yet. Pulling open the shades he stares out into a whirlwind of white, swirling throughout the air, trees swaying back and forth, street lights flickering on and off, the wind’s cry like a siren, piercing the sinister looking skies.
He can’t sleep after that, curling under his sheets with his laptop, reading reports about the catastrophes on the internet. It’s the same everywhere: inexplicable disasters, homes destroyed, shops broken into, utter chaos, everywhere, followed by countless deaths. There’s no hope for 2012, most sources say, suggesting the end of the world as we know it will be on New Years’ Eve.
Seven days, Jin thinks. Just a week left before everything in the world vanishes, sucked up by a black hole, evaporates into thin air. He wonders how it’ll happen. He wonders if he’ll be able to tell.
Yamapi calls him an hour later. “What do you think?” he asks in form of greeting.
“About what? The world ending in seven days?”
“Yeah,” Yamapi replies. “Do you believe it?”
“Seems true,” Jin says with a shrug. “It’s gotten worse here. I can barely see out of the windows, it’s just a blur of snow. What’s it like there?”
“It’s picked up here, too. There’s more lightening now. It’s hitting the ground all over the place. things are going up in flames. Ryo-chan said the jimusho got hit, but I don’t know if he’s telling the truth. No one’s been there in weeks.”
Jin laughs a little under his breath, the image of the company building up in flames from lightening just a little amusing. “Johnny finally let you guys stop working? I’d figure he’d make you tough it out until you all perished on the job.”
“Very funny,” Yamapi says and Jin grins.
They spend most of the early morning on the phone, talking nonsense as they usually do. Yamapi dispels Jin’s anxiety and his loneliness. He still thinks of how much he’d like being in Japan, being there with Yamapi, spending the last week on Earth together. It wouldn’t be as frightening, Jin thinks, if Yamapi was with him, physically beside him, sharing the stupid pile of blankets and watching the blizzard outside. They wouldn’t need to say anything, just his presence would be enough.
It’s too late for all of the things he never said, anyway, the things he wish he had. He can’t say it now, doesn’t want to compromise the final days he has with his best friend, even if it’s through sporadic phone calls, it’s better than losing him completely. It’s what Jin fears most.
“Are you really not scared?” Jin asks him later.
“No,” Yamapi says. “I’ve had a good life. I don’t regret anything. If this is how the world ends, then that’s how it’s meant to be.” He pauses. “Wait, are you?”
“Yeah,” Jin admits, biting his lower lip. “I’m scared.” He grows a little worried when Yamapi is silent on the other end for a long time, and quickly adds with a hollow laugh, “Don’t worry about it, though. I’ll be okay.”
“Jin,” Yamapi says in that voice when he knows Jin’s lying through his teeth.
“Really, Pi,” Jin insists. “I’ll be fine.”
And thankfully Yamapi knows not to push it; they’re not best friends for nothing, after all. He just sighs and says, “If you’re sure.”
“Of course I am!” Jin exclaims, and he can picture Yamapi shaking his head with a tiny smile, sitting on his couch or lying in bed in his apartment. And again he wishes he could be there.
“Well, there are still seven whole days left,” Yamapi says eventually. “I’ll make sure you’re not scared by the end of it.”
Jin laughs and teases, “Oh, yeah, because you have that kind of power,” even though inside he’s really glad.
--
Jin is woken on Christmas morning much like he was the day before; a storm nearly shaking his entire building and snow whirling into the windows at three-thirty. When he looks outside, it seems like there is a blizzard and a tornado all at once: snow is everywhere, and he can barely make out the shadowy clouds in the sky. There’s an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach as he stares out the window, a feeling that doesn’t shake even when he goes back to sleep and wakes three hours later.
It looks exactly the same outside then, and if he didn’t know he’d really slept, he’d think it was some strange déjà vu. He turns on the television to see what the news is, except the channels are all gone, and all that greets him is static. He finds nothing new on the internet anywhere, every single article and news clip dated from last night. Jin grows worried and searches harder, only a few things pop up in the end, all from the United States, speculations that the predictions were wrong; today is the end of the world.
Jin doesn’t want to believe it. He shuts his laptop with more force than necessary but he doesn’t care. He sinks back against the mattress, looks up at the ceiling.
Yamapi said he would call around eight, Jin’s time, and Jin waits in anticipation. He has nothing else to do to occupy his time, refusing to use his laptop because he knows he’ll end up on the internet, looking up more information, finding out things he doesn’t want to know.
He ends up falling asleep again for over two hours, missing his call time with Yamapi. But a check to his phone shows no missed calls, no voicemails, and his stomach plummets with restlessness, that strange feeling that some is wrong but he can’t figure out what.
Outside the storm continues, but Jin can’t tell if it’s gotten worse or not.
Yamapi doesn’t call. Jin waits another hour. Panic bubbles in his stomach, replacing his anxiety, and rises throughout his veins. He calls Yamapi instead and listens to the phone ring, ring, ring, and ring.
Yamapi’s cheerful voicemail is all that greets him in the end, but Jin won’t give up that easily. He calls again, and again, but each time the resulting rings seem to grow louder, longer.
Jin drops his phone, his hand shaking just a bit, and his heart thudding in his chest. He looks out of the window, the wind screeching, the snow howling, and as Jin approaches the glass, he can see the sky, the blackness splitting in half, jagged lines crisscrossing from one end to another.
And he knows what it means, mesmerized as he watches the darkness break and pull the entire frozen city of Los Angeles up through its gaps.
He remembers what Yamapi told him about not being scared and a small smile stretches across his lips. There isn’t anything to be afraid of, he thinks, as his apartment building shakes harder, as skyscrapers in the distance crumble to the ground.
There’s nothing to be afraid of because on the other side there is everyone he has missed, everyone he longs to see. On the other side he won’t have to worry about being alone.
end.
note: uh, idk. thank you for reading. ;__; ♥ i hope you liked it. D:
Pairing: Mostly Jin-centric, with some sort of ambiguous Pin and KAT-TUN friendship.
Rating: PG
Warnings: future!fic (only a year), apocalyptic!fic, angst, weirdness, and idefk. DX
Summary: On Christmas morning, the world ends.
Author’s Note: 4014 words. For crystallekil because she wanted it. ♥ Jin talked about his song Christmas Morning here and how it’s supposedly about the end of the world. I don’t really know what this turned into, so uhm. Yeah. I hope you like it anyway? DX *hides*
“What is it like over there?”
Jin shrugs even through Yamapi can’t see it, and shifts his phone more comfortably in the crook between his shoulder and ear. He glances out of the windows, the drapes spread wide open, looking over onto the frozen, white canvas outside.
“Cold,” he says eventually, and curls up under his covers a bit more. His heater busted a few days ago; the extremity of the weather being too much for it to handle. There hasn’t been anyone around to get it fixed.
Yamapi laughs on the other end, a little breathless and sad. Lonely. Jin feels it in his chest. He grips his phone tighter. “It’s raining like crazy, here,” he tells Jin, though Jin already knows, caught it on his television that morning before the current went out, black and gray fuzz filling the screen, white noise crackling through the speakers.
“Pi,” he says quietly after a long stretch of silence. They have them quite often these days, unsure of what to say, every other topic already discussed and exhausted. There’s only so much to say when the world is ending.
“I know,” is all Yamapi says in reply and he does, Jin knows he does, and that means more than anything.
--
There are snowstorms all over the United States. Los Angeles is just one of the many cities covered in piles of pale, lifeless snow. Buildings look like tall icebergs erupting from cascades of white. The skies are all dark, a deep shade of gray, and blizzards begin and end within hours every day.
Jin is trapped. He wishes the signs had come sooner, wishes he could have gotten the first ticket back home - his real home. One year in L.A. and he still hasn’t adjusted. Despite his love for the city, he hasn’t gotten used to being unable to head to his parents house just to eat his mother’s cooking or tease his brother, hasn’t gotten used to visiting his favorite places, hasn’t gotten used to just heading to Yamapi’s and taking over half of his bed because he’s too lazy to get all the way to his own.
His apartment in L.A. is small and dingy, nothing like where he lived before. Only a few minimal things fill up the place; the rest are still in boxes. He hasn’t had the time, with his first U.S. Tour the fall of 2010, followed by an ever larger tour the next year, and the release of an album. It didn’t sell well at all, for the States’ standards, but Jin had expected that. He knew it’d be hard, he was prepared. He still felt proud, prouder than ever, an inexplicable glee in his chest when he had strolled into the nearest music store to find his CD on the shelves.
Even when Yamapi had called and teased him about it, Jin had been soaring with pride. It was his first real accomplishment, he thought, without the aid of a major industry stamped across his forehead.
“I’ll send you a copy. I’ll even sign it. Someday it’ll be worth millions,” Jin had told him only to end up in a fit of laughter when Yamapi said he’d already ordered one.
This is what he thinks about these days, with nothing else to do. It’s worse here than in Tokyo, where he knows Yamapi and the others are sometimes forced into keeping their meetings, even though everyone knows there is no use. Yamapi does it because he wants to, he tells Jin, because he’ll keep his fans happy until the day that he dies, until the world swallows them all up in one giant gulp.
“I’m not scared,” he says one day, and Jin wishes he could be that strong.
--
There are floods in the Sahara and blazing sunlight in Greenland; tsunamis destroy the shores of England and hailstorms pelt nearly all of South America.
All Jin cares about is Japan. The unyielding thunderstorms of crackling lightning and booming thunder with torrential rain. He thinks about his family and his friends. Though mostly he thinks about Yamapi, and how he is stuck here, across an ocean that is now raging full of whirlpools, in a frozen desert on his own.
He hasn’t heard from any of his L.A. friends in a long time. Not for a month at least, he thinks. And now it’s December, and the winds are colder, crisper, and Jin merely huddles under as many layers of clothing he can, glad that his neighbor used to live in one of those states were snow was a regular part of the year and gave Jin a few thick blankets and winter coats.
Jin hasn’t heard from him in weeks, either.
He rarely ventures outside, he’s heard of the people who go and never come back and he doesn’t want to risk it. He has food, stocked up when the first snow fell. He doesn’t eat that much; he never has the appetite, and the insistent uneasiness in his stomach makes it hard to keep anything down.
He can’t tell the days from the nights, the entire country encased in a billowing darkness that feels haunted. He’s never felt more alone in his life, his only comfort from the few telephone calls he makes as the world continues to spin towards its end.
--
“Are you okay?”
Jin nods to himself and replies with a strained, “I’m fine, Mom.”
She doesn’t believe him, he can tell in her voice. “You’ve been eating properly?”
He nods again. “Of course.” He tries to sound cheerful.
“I miss you, baby,” she says and he’s too choked up now to reply; but it’s okay because Jin knows she knows he wishes he was there instead of here.
--
Yamapi’s the only person he can talk to normally. Because Yamapi is Yamapi and they have no secrets.
“I’m lonely,” he tells him, and he is. It’s nearing Christmas, according to the calendar on his phone. It was hard last year, spending his first Christmas in L.A. with the knowledge that he’s actually going to be here for a very long time, unlike when he was here in 2006, which had all in all felt more like a vacation than an actual, nearly permanent move. This year it’s even worse, with the continuous blizzards that shake the walls and the whistling wind that seems to have replaced all human presence. “This is some kind of punishment for me leaving, isn’t it?”
Yamapi snorts. “Contrary to what you may think, the world does not, in fact, revolve around you,” he says and Jin finds himself grinning for the first time in days.
“I wish I was in Japan,” he says, snuggling under covers on his couch. He flips through channels on the television, mostly crackling, shaky pictures. The only channels that work are reporting news on the world’s destructions: riots all over the globe, people breaking into empty homes and shops, taking whatever they can get their hands on, others injured, their homes torn apart by the hundreds of natural disasters taking place at once, even more dying, or dead already, the toll escalating with each passing day. Jin shuts the television off, tosses the remote to the floor, watches it slide under a bookshelf.
“I wish you were here, too,” Yamapi says in a quiet voice, so quiet Jin almost doesn’t catch it. But he does, and it makes his heart clench painfully, makes his loneliness even more profound.
He can imagine it, if he’d been there with Yamapi, sitting together in one of their apartments, watching the rain come down in waterfalls, sliding down the windows while lightening illuminates the city better than any of its usual neon lights, and laugh stupidly after thunder crashes and scares them both.
It makes him laugh, the image in his head, because it’s so them, and it’s so familiar, warmth tingling under his skin. Yamapi makes an affronted sound, thinking Jin’s laughing at him, but Jin quickly says, “Sorry, sorry. It’s not you. I was just thinking about something.”
“Care to share?”
“Not really,” Jin replies, because even though his thoughts were pretty innocent, and that he knows Yamapi would share in the amusement, Jin’s own feelings about it are not entirely that naïve.
“Bakanishi,” Yamapi says and Jin laughs again because it’s been far too long since he heard that and why does it make him feel so good and so sad all at once.
He falls onto his back upon the couch and closes his eyes, imagines Yamapi’s smiling face staring back at him. He opens them with a sigh and a few minutes stretch in silence. He has so many things he wants to ask but no idea how to approach them, questions and worries and a need to know swelling inside of him. Yamapi is his only connection to Japan, and other than his mother, Jin hasn’t talked to anyone else in a long time. Ryo was probably the last person he talked to that wasn’t Yamapi or his family, and Jin wonders how he is, because when he tried to call a week ago, an automated voice told him the number was no longer in service. He’d been in a fit of panic, then, but Yamapi had told him everything was all right, and even though Jin had let out a sigh of relief, the queasiness and the pain lingered inside him for a long time after.
“Pi,” he starts after awhile, and his voice gets a little shaky as he continues, “H-How, how are, um. How are-”
Yamapi cuts him off with a chuckle. “You are so transparent, Jin,” he says. “If you call them, they’ll tell you they’re fine.”
Jin gnaws the corner of his mouth for a moment before he replies, “I don’t know if I can.”
“You can,” Yamapi says, exuding confidence as he always does, and Jin can feel it, as if it’s an electric current shot through their connected phones. “You will. Because you want to.”
And he does, even though it scares him almost as much as the end of the world. “You need to stop with this always being right shit,” Jin says and slowly smiles as Yamapi laughs loudly on the other end.
--
He hasn’t talked to any of them since he left. It sounds bad, but it’s the truth. He keeps up with their work, knows who’s doing a drama, who’s in a movie, who’s got a stage play, knows when they release something, occasionally watches it on YouTube with both nostalgia and happiness. They live different lives now; it’s as simple as that. Not once as any of them contacted him, and not once has he. Though the urge to pick up the phone and ring one of them up, complain and whine or just talk about nothing like they used to, that urge has risen many times. Jin just never went through with it. Somehow, inside, he thinks he doesn’t want to talk to them, not until he can make it big here, not until he proves what he set out to do, not until he can tell them, all of them, “Thank you” - for letting him go.
One by one he calls each of them, starting with the easiest and working his way to the most difficult. Taguchi just laughs and makes a stupid pun that actually has Jin laughing but he’s not sure if because it’s been that long or if Taguchi’s jokes have gotten that good since they last spoke. Either way, the conversation makes him happy, and gives him the courage to call Nakamaru. Nakamaru tells him everything that’s been going on gladly, within the group, the company, and Japan in general. Jin listens to him with probably the most rapt attention he’s ever given, and in the end, he just makes fun of Nakamaru’s face and goes down the list. It’s a little hard deciding who is probably angrier at him, Ueda or Koki, but in the end he calls Koki first because he’s a softy on the inside.
Koki hangs up on him when Jin calls first, and makes him wonder if he chose the right person. Except five minutes later while Jin debates calling him back, Koki calls, and exclaims, “Took you fucking long enough!” the second their phones connect. Jin lets out a sigh of relief because it is so Koki and he wonders inside, why he really hadn’t done this sooner. Ueda’s call is about the same as Koki’s, a lot of griping and bitter comments in the beginning, but then Ueda’s his usual bubbly self and leaving Jin with an empty threat of punches when they see each other next; even though they both know it won’t happen.
Calling Kame is the hardest, and Jin dials and hangs up five times the second the lines connect. He knows Kame knows it’s him, but Jin just can’t face it. Because it’s Kame, who at one point, used to be his closest friend; Kame, who he sometimes feels like he betrayed, even though they haven’t been real friends for years. It’s hard to talk to him and Jin doesn’t know what to do.
So when Kame calls him, Jin stares at his phone until the final ring before he answers with a shaky, “Hello?”
“You are such an idiot,” Kame says in form of greeting, and Jin thinks it’s rather appropriate, even if it does make him glare at his wall. “Don’t hang up like that, you’re such a girl.”
Jin snorts. “Coming from you, that’s saying a lot,” he snipes back.
Silence follows and Jin tries to think of what to say. It was easy with the others so why is it so hard with Kame? A hundred things run through his head, old memories from when they were young, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, when it felt like the entire world was at their fingertips, just waiting to be grasped and taken over with their singing and dancing and all around awesome. So many things have changed since then, and yet nothing has changed at all. He’s still Jin, and this is still Kame, sighing on the other end like he always did whenever he was exasperated, worn-out.
“Jin,” he says softly and Jin can’t even remember the last time Kame called him that; it’s been Akanishi for a long time.
He’s not sure what Kame has to say, not sure if he’s prepared to hear it, at least not until Jin says his own piece. “Kame,” he says quickly before Kame can begin, and it feels completely natural to call him Kame now, too, like he never stopped. “Look, I. I just wanted to say-”
“If you’re going to apologize for being a selfish asshole, don’t bother,” Kame says. “Not even the apocalypse could have changed you that much.”
Jin purses his lips into a pout. “But-”
“Seriously, Jin,” Kame says. “If you do, I’ll find a way over there and punch you in the face.”
Jin shakes his head, suppressing a smile. “Ueda said the same thing.”
Kame laughs. “He would,” he says with amusement. “What made you think I’d want to hear it then?”
Jin shrugs. “I don’t know, I just. Thought it needed to be said, what with the world ending and all.”
“That is so like you. Only calling us because this is your last chance; you wouldn’t have done it if everything was still okay, would you?”
It’s true and Jin knows it, but it doesn’t make the sting any less painful. “You’re right,” he says eventually and Kame mock gasps on the other end.
“Agreeing with me? That’s a first,” he says and Jin laughs.
“Things have changed,” Jin says with bravado. “I’m a different person.”
Kame snorts disbelievingly and Jin realizes he’s grinning, reminded of so many years ago when there wasn’t any hostility between them. It’s nice, this feeling, and Jin almost hates himself for waiting so long, that it took him leaving the band, and the country, for him and Kame to finally come to an understanding.
They talk for awhile, about everything and nothing, and it feels a little like catharsis, having talked to all of them, of clearing up the cobwebs. Even if it took this long, he’s glad he did it in the end, before the end, and that’s really all that matters.
When Kame says he has to go, Jin feels a little sad, but covers it up with a cheery, “I’ll talk to you later.”
“If you want,” is Kame’s response.
“Oh, and Kame?” he says quickly before Kame hangs up.
“What?”
Jin takes a deep breath and with all of his courage says, “Thank you.”
--
Christmas Eve is the worst day so far; Jin wakes in the middle of the night to the worst blizzard he’s heard yet. Pulling open the shades he stares out into a whirlwind of white, swirling throughout the air, trees swaying back and forth, street lights flickering on and off, the wind’s cry like a siren, piercing the sinister looking skies.
He can’t sleep after that, curling under his sheets with his laptop, reading reports about the catastrophes on the internet. It’s the same everywhere: inexplicable disasters, homes destroyed, shops broken into, utter chaos, everywhere, followed by countless deaths. There’s no hope for 2012, most sources say, suggesting the end of the world as we know it will be on New Years’ Eve.
Seven days, Jin thinks. Just a week left before everything in the world vanishes, sucked up by a black hole, evaporates into thin air. He wonders how it’ll happen. He wonders if he’ll be able to tell.
Yamapi calls him an hour later. “What do you think?” he asks in form of greeting.
“About what? The world ending in seven days?”
“Yeah,” Yamapi replies. “Do you believe it?”
“Seems true,” Jin says with a shrug. “It’s gotten worse here. I can barely see out of the windows, it’s just a blur of snow. What’s it like there?”
“It’s picked up here, too. There’s more lightening now. It’s hitting the ground all over the place. things are going up in flames. Ryo-chan said the jimusho got hit, but I don’t know if he’s telling the truth. No one’s been there in weeks.”
Jin laughs a little under his breath, the image of the company building up in flames from lightening just a little amusing. “Johnny finally let you guys stop working? I’d figure he’d make you tough it out until you all perished on the job.”
“Very funny,” Yamapi says and Jin grins.
They spend most of the early morning on the phone, talking nonsense as they usually do. Yamapi dispels Jin’s anxiety and his loneliness. He still thinks of how much he’d like being in Japan, being there with Yamapi, spending the last week on Earth together. It wouldn’t be as frightening, Jin thinks, if Yamapi was with him, physically beside him, sharing the stupid pile of blankets and watching the blizzard outside. They wouldn’t need to say anything, just his presence would be enough.
It’s too late for all of the things he never said, anyway, the things he wish he had. He can’t say it now, doesn’t want to compromise the final days he has with his best friend, even if it’s through sporadic phone calls, it’s better than losing him completely. It’s what Jin fears most.
“Are you really not scared?” Jin asks him later.
“No,” Yamapi says. “I’ve had a good life. I don’t regret anything. If this is how the world ends, then that’s how it’s meant to be.” He pauses. “Wait, are you?”
“Yeah,” Jin admits, biting his lower lip. “I’m scared.” He grows a little worried when Yamapi is silent on the other end for a long time, and quickly adds with a hollow laugh, “Don’t worry about it, though. I’ll be okay.”
“Jin,” Yamapi says in that voice when he knows Jin’s lying through his teeth.
“Really, Pi,” Jin insists. “I’ll be fine.”
And thankfully Yamapi knows not to push it; they’re not best friends for nothing, after all. He just sighs and says, “If you’re sure.”
“Of course I am!” Jin exclaims, and he can picture Yamapi shaking his head with a tiny smile, sitting on his couch or lying in bed in his apartment. And again he wishes he could be there.
“Well, there are still seven whole days left,” Yamapi says eventually. “I’ll make sure you’re not scared by the end of it.”
Jin laughs and teases, “Oh, yeah, because you have that kind of power,” even though inside he’s really glad.
--
Jin is woken on Christmas morning much like he was the day before; a storm nearly shaking his entire building and snow whirling into the windows at three-thirty. When he looks outside, it seems like there is a blizzard and a tornado all at once: snow is everywhere, and he can barely make out the shadowy clouds in the sky. There’s an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach as he stares out the window, a feeling that doesn’t shake even when he goes back to sleep and wakes three hours later.
It looks exactly the same outside then, and if he didn’t know he’d really slept, he’d think it was some strange déjà vu. He turns on the television to see what the news is, except the channels are all gone, and all that greets him is static. He finds nothing new on the internet anywhere, every single article and news clip dated from last night. Jin grows worried and searches harder, only a few things pop up in the end, all from the United States, speculations that the predictions were wrong; today is the end of the world.
Jin doesn’t want to believe it. He shuts his laptop with more force than necessary but he doesn’t care. He sinks back against the mattress, looks up at the ceiling.
Yamapi said he would call around eight, Jin’s time, and Jin waits in anticipation. He has nothing else to do to occupy his time, refusing to use his laptop because he knows he’ll end up on the internet, looking up more information, finding out things he doesn’t want to know.
He ends up falling asleep again for over two hours, missing his call time with Yamapi. But a check to his phone shows no missed calls, no voicemails, and his stomach plummets with restlessness, that strange feeling that some is wrong but he can’t figure out what.
Outside the storm continues, but Jin can’t tell if it’s gotten worse or not.
Yamapi doesn’t call. Jin waits another hour. Panic bubbles in his stomach, replacing his anxiety, and rises throughout his veins. He calls Yamapi instead and listens to the phone ring, ring, ring, and ring.
Yamapi’s cheerful voicemail is all that greets him in the end, but Jin won’t give up that easily. He calls again, and again, but each time the resulting rings seem to grow louder, longer.
Jin drops his phone, his hand shaking just a bit, and his heart thudding in his chest. He looks out of the window, the wind screeching, the snow howling, and as Jin approaches the glass, he can see the sky, the blackness splitting in half, jagged lines crisscrossing from one end to another.
And he knows what it means, mesmerized as he watches the darkness break and pull the entire frozen city of Los Angeles up through its gaps.
He remembers what Yamapi told him about not being scared and a small smile stretches across his lips. There isn’t anything to be afraid of, he thinks, as his apartment building shakes harder, as skyscrapers in the distance crumble to the ground.
There’s nothing to be afraid of because on the other side there is everyone he has missed, everyone he longs to see. On the other side he won’t have to worry about being alone.
end.
note: uh, idk. thank you for reading. ;__; ♥ i hope you liked it. D: